I began as one should, making samples for size and colour, and thought I’d worked out how much fleece and silk to use, but something went awry between the sample stage and the finished item - which is big enough for a small winter neckscarf, but not by any means for a wrap!

As time was getting short, I decided just to plunge in and try again, no more time for sampling, so I laid out a lot of fleece, silk and fabric, and this is the result.

The size is right and it drapes beautifully, I really like its bright summery feel and have already worn it as a wrap - I may turn it into a skirt or a waistcoat later on. But I thought that it still wasn’t quite what I was after - too much sunshiny yellow and really too much personality for the dress it was supposed to be wrapping. It would have done, but as there were still a couple of days left, I decided to have another go…

This time I did nuno felting in rosy, leafy colours on a base of silk chiffon, and it turned out just how I wanted it! The last pic is me on the day of the wedding with our lovely daughters.

I’ll be at the Woolfest all day on Friday and would love to say hi to any bloggers who are there too.

The vision is that felters all over the world will join together to display their felt outside their homes, and the theme will be a slice of the colour wheel, from yellow through red. This sounds so exciting:

“People around the world will be surprised by finding yellow felt on doorsteps, orange felt birds in parks, children wearing red felt vests and husbands carrying bright felt bags to work. There will be felt in museums and felt in markets. There will be felt groups organizing open days and workshops. …felt in trees, on cars on bicycles and on mountaintops.”

Information about Felt United, the International Day of Felt and the call to artists is on the Felt United web site.

What are your current obsessions? feltmaking, dyeing, breakfast

What are you currently reading? Shibori by Yoshiko Wada, Life without Bread by Allan and Lutz, Sword at Sunset by Rosemary Sutcliff

What’s for dinner? goulash with soured cream, salad, cauliflower gratin

Where do you plan to travel to next? Edinburgh, for my nephew’s wedding, then Cockermouth for the Woolfest

What is your favourite film ever? Some Kind of Wonderful

Care to share some wisdom? motivation follows action (I wish I know who said that, it’s so true)

Where would you rather be right now? there’s nowhere I’d rather be than here, on Tiree

If you could be an animal other than a human, what would it be? a dolphin

What is your favourite flower? columbine, though to choose just one sorely challenges my decision-making capacity

Favourite textile artist? no, one is just not possible - Jane McKeating, Heike Doll, Jae Maries, India Flint, ……

What’s your favourite word? (my addition) spindrift

Sorry about the shiny photo - I think it looks so pretty all packaged up I haven’t opened any of the bags yet!

Most of the fleece I’ve used up to now has been space dyed, which is wonderful for subtle colour changes but sometimes there’s only a scrap of a particular colour, and I’m always pulling little tufts out of the middle of the tops to get at the shade I want!

I’ve looked at various mixed packs of fleece recently, thinking they seem like a good way to acquire a bigger colour palette. In time I’m sure certain colours will be worth buying in bigger quantities but for now it’s more important to me to have a little of a lot of colours than large quantities of a few.

However,  I hadn’t seen any packs with a range of colours that really excited me till I discovered the lovely rosiepink crafts. Believe it or not, I ordered these at about 11.30pm last Monday night and they arrived in Tiree on Wednesday all the way from the south coast of England.

The vibrant coloured fabrics at the bottom are some hand-dyed scrim that Annie and Lyn (aka rosiepink) also very kindly sent along with the fleece for me to experiment with, having looked at my blog and some of the things I’ve been trying out recently! Annie and Lyn’s own blog is very interesting with a number of felt-related tutorials and tips as well as examples of their work - well worth a visit.

As if this didn’t feel enough like Christmas, I had an email yesterday from The Book Depository, to say that this book, which I pre-ordered a few weeks ago, has just come into stock - more exciting post to look forward to. I should confess that I found out about the book by squandering my time watching their utterly fascinating (but ultimately expensive) live mashup of who’s buying what books and where. So much more fun than “Customers who bought the items in your Shopping Basket also bought…”…

I’ve been doing a little of this and that, focusing on fabric manipulation as I get back into OCA Textiles 1, some stitched resists, some felt. One exercise was to develop a manipulated sample from a previous design, and I went back to these block prints that were inspired by a tulip and then scanned to try out designs on the computer.

I simplified the shapes and stitched a repeating pattern based on circles and the spaces between. I was thinking about bands of colour and bands of resist. It’s a 30cm square.

Pulling the stitches up was a bit fiddly, and then I’m always tempted to leave them gathered, loving the structures they  make.

I dyed this with some other pieces (of which more in another post) and this was the end result.

I would have liked a bit more contrast - for some reason this calico didn’t take the dye as well as some of the other cottons in the same dyebath, but apart from that I was quite pleased with the overall effect.

I’d like to try other variations with colour, width of the stitching, etc. And I noticed that last time I dyed some stitched resist (when I soaked the bundles in the soda solution beforehand) the whites were very white, whereas here the ‘white’ is actually a very pale purple. These were soaked in water, then added to a dye bucket and the soda added after 30 minutes, and I used some urea, so either or both of those could have had an effect on the resist. The stitching itself was pulled up just as tightly as the earlier samples, more tightly if anything - I’ve been watching Yoshiko Iwamoto Wada’s Arimatsu Narumi Shibori DVD, and learning how to use the needle to knot the pulled up thread without letting the stitches loosen. Not that I have mastered it - the Japanese artists make it look so easy - but I’m practising!

When I started this piece my plan was to make a piece of fabric and use part of it to cover a dining chair seat but I’m not sure now, I quite like it as a whole. Though I would have paid a bit more attention to the edges if I hadn’t been intending to cut them off! Perhaps I’ll hang it up for a while and then cut it up. It’s 53 x 73 cm (shrunk from 75 x 95cm).

If you hang felt, how do you hang it? if you don’t want to frame it? I don’t think I’ve come across anything written down about that and would be interested to know what methods people use.

On another note, I was thrilled to learn a week or two back that I’d won a giveaway on Caroline Inckle’s blog The house of secret superheroes and could choose any print from her Etsy shop - a difficult decision as they are all so lovely, but in the end this is the one I chose…

It’s ‘Meeting Mr Bear’, which is one of a set I’ve loved since I first saw them on Caroline’s old blog. The image says something very special and magical to me about God, about love and prayer and discovery and trust. I know that’s a very idiosyncratic interpretation of the work, but this image touches my spirit and it’s such a joy to me to have the print. Thank you, Caroline.

The first two pieces, focusing on working with colour, are flat felt in merino with a little silk floss on the surface. The first is more about the colours outside my window; the second, the colours inside my head.

before

after

before

after

The next sample is nuno felt using sari ribbon with a cobwebby layer of fleece, in this one the top layer is the ‘back’.

before

after

I really like the scribbly texture where the frayed edges of the ribbon are felted in, it looks almost like machine embroidery.

detail

The next experiment was to follow up a thought I’d had when making this scarf, ‘what if I felt a cord tied with sari ribbon?’

before

after

Finally, I made a nuno felt ’sandwich’ of two layers of thinly laid fleece trapping a layer of fabric scraps between. Sorry about the blurry ‘before’ image!

before

after

The next colour pieces I do are going to be bigger! I want to make some seat covers for a set of dining chairs we have that are in rags. I’m going to try the felted cord again, with a variety of ribbons and yarns; and the nuno pieces are quite soft and stretchy and would need to be stronger for actual use - more experiments definitely needed there!

I’ve applied to end the deferment of my OCA Textiles 1 course at the beginning of March - exciting and a bit daunting as I’ve got so out of the habit. I’ve already ascertained that I can focus on nuno felt and shibori for the fabric manipulation module I’ll be going back to, so I can continue to build on what I’ve been doing recently.

I had some other bits of news but I think I’ll save them for another post as this one seems to have grown very long already.

The Media Bar can be used with several different media services including Facebook and YouTube, but I only use it with Flickr. When the bar is open (at the top of the screen by default though you can move it to the bottom) it displays photo feeds laid out as a single-row grid of square tiles. (I have a thing for grid layouts so this is great for a start!)

There are a couple of built-in streams, which update regularly to show the latest images that have been added to Flickr, for example photos from your Flickr contacts:

But you can have your own custom streams too, and this is where the fun really starts. You can add your favourite Flickr searches - mine include “stitch textile”:

shibori:

and “nuno felt”:

It’s visually exciting to see the thumbnails together, and if something particularly catches your eye, you can hover over the thumbnail and expand the image to see it better and find out who it belongs to - this one is by felt4uart:

Or you can click through direct to the image on Flickr (this is by KatharinaBe):

You can tell someone else about an image:

And save your favourite searches to revisit:

Sometimes I play with keyword searches for inspiration - this was “orange spiral”:

The default media stream is “Preview New” which displays the newest images from all your saved searches, including your Flickr contacts.

I spend much of my working day using a browser, so I really like this colourful little changing show of textiles and design inspiration quietly feeding itself onto my screen. Something will often catch my eye and give me a moment of pleasure. When I stop for a break I sometimes scroll back through recent images and maybe follow through one or two that stand out. And if it all gets too distracting, I can just close up the Media Bar, knowing next time I open it up there’ll be new goodies to enjoy.

As it grew, I realised I hadn’t paid enough attention to the shape - with only a single ball of wool I should have been increasing at a much faster rate to end up with a shallow isosceles triangle that would be wide enough to go round my neck, instead of one like this…

I looked at the ball band and the yarn was 30% wool - I can felt into this, I thought.

So, I cut it up …

… chose some fleece …

… laid it out …

… wetted and soaped and rubbed it for a while. It looked promising …

… but what I actually ended up with was a ribbon of prefelt and a bit of felted knitting, loosely attached to each other in about three places. I think I was too lavish with the soap.

With nothing to lose I decided to sling the whole lot in the washing machine. I tied strips of calico round it at intervals to hold the felt and the knitting together, and put it in on a 60 degree quick wash with a pair of jeans.

The result was a nice uneven felted rope, joined firmly to the knitting wherever there was a calico strip. I snipped off the calico, added some wrapping highlights along the length with just a little lovely shiny embroidery thread, and here it is… a scarf, tousled rather than fluffy, and surprisingly warm.

The calico was quite well entangled and would happily have stayed where it was - another time I’d use a nice space dyed piece instead of white, or maybe sari ribbon or a yarn wrapping, and make it an integral part.

On another note, I’ve just joined an exciting new challenge - Today’s Title Is… - set up by Helen Suzanne of Heb-Art Journal. The challenge is to start from a given title and capture the first image it sparks off in the mind’s eye, in any visual medium. This week’s title is Blue Chair. Do visit to see all the wonderfully varied interpretations and maybe you’ll be tempted to join in too

I hadn’t thought about it for ages till Alan reminded me how much I used to enjoy it, so last weekend I got out the ironing board and spent a couple of hours ironing away - I have to admit that creative ironing is almost the only kind I ever do.

I tried incorporating a few different materials and some were more successful than others. These samples include bits of felt, merino fibres, thowsters’ waste, bamboo fibres, sari yarn and a lacy fabric.

I like the way the sari yarn bleeds dye into the surface (at the bottom of the biggest piece, and the little piece on the left in the middle). The felt and merino fibres were the only things I tried that didn’t bond so well; at least, they need a high ratio of cocoon strippings to stick to, and you get loose bits and ‘floating’ layers. That could be a feature, but it makes the textile more fragile.

In the next sample I carded about equal quantities of silk and merino for a while to mix them. I like this effect.

Bamboo fibre and synthetic lace fabric both bond very well.

I like the fact that you can do a lot of experiments in a relatively short time, which is good when you’re not feeling very creative, and a little silk goes a long way. There are lots of lovely possibilities.

I unwrapped my rusty calico soon after the new year, not a finished piece of fabric really - I don’t think it stayed wet enough, but a start for some overdyeing, anyway. I like the marks on the left. I’m ordering some silk so I can try pole-wrapping that now I’m here to keep an eye on it.